In one breath they say that people with FND need better care, but they also seem to want to reduce investigations that might identify other causes of the reported symptoms.
They include this quote in the paper. Which illustrates just how limited their understanding is. Of course things that we think about ourselves can be used to diminish us. Indeed, we can end up diminishing ourselves before anyone else gets the chance if society is set up to encourage that.
Encouraging people to believe that they would not be ill if they just thought differently is a perfect example of how someone can be diminished by what they accept - some can be diminished to the point of actually no longer being living. Whole diseases affecting millions of people can be so diminished that they are scarcely recognised and desperately under-researched.
I find the inclusion of quotes from Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood (We lived in the gaps between the stories. The Handmaid's Tale) incredibly distasteful given the harm that at least some of these authors have inflicted on women, not just their patients, but on the general impression of women. The whole BPS story where people, especially women, are taught to negate their own experience of the world would fit very neatly in an Atwood dystopia. It really is as if a public relations firm has provided advice on how to DARVO, on how to confuse a message.
The only positive aspect of this paper is that the authors seem to be pleading to be taken seriously, to be accepted by their medical peers - and so perhaps they are not at present. To the authors, I say, learn about good practice in experimental design and find some real evidence for your treatments. If you can do that, then respect will be due.
"We call for.."
A manifesto then. At least they've started to be honest about what they do then. Oh, except they haven't because it is a 'hand over to us' but without details of the what.
The lack of insight is demonstrated by that quote you've picked out and the fact the authors can't see what they've written around that is 'why won't these people know their place' equivalent. With some manifesto of their own personal psychology trying to infer them not understanding the answer to that isn't their own thinking problems.
We need to be allowed to say the line that both women, and people who trot out a self-label for themself of 'feminist' can well be some of the worst misogynists towards women, certainly specific women. It's a weird concoction of terms some seem to get confused, but not really if you think that certain types just have irrational contempt for certain women, if they get the opportunity to get away with it, and that tends to be reflected in what they do and say about
them whatever they like to think of themselves of re: other stuff.
Sticking a label on another group without proof and suggesting insinuations about their personality whilst not striving to allow them to speak for themselves and for you to hear them is basically that. So anyone who says 'these women' is a good clue. Or who thinks they can theorise for someone else without ever caring to know them. It's as objectifying as anyone else who might do that.
And I find Margaret Atwood and her elucidation of just how certain women actually prop up that hierarchy in the Handmaiden's Tale a picture that is too familiar and obvious when you see it in real-life for even those doing it to deny. Yes there is one aspect that is different, which might be picked on as distasteful but sorry the rest - given the author researched it on societies that build this way around contexts that don't involve handmaiden's specifically -
is relevant to draw on.
The language in that abstract is chilling to me. And that is no exaggeration. A request for 'permission' to do unto others "the care they need". Different to promising to get behind scientific research to find out what actually the condition is to make sure you provide something actually useful. But I know the context from which it comes as 'a plea' and from whom and wat they've been involved in previously etc.
Bit blinking weird and unoriginal that suddenly this author is referenced within weeks of me mentioning her (it was the Testaments actually - which is more incisive as it shows how such powers etc build). It does feel like Darvo as simply as someone not liking it when the bell rings too close and only has the intellectual reaction of trying to point the finger in reversal before anyone else does at them.
I'm guessing this line will be cut, but yes there is a certain character that I am actually often reminded of being in the world where I do read 'the latest from' and I do think Atwood nailed the psychology and the journey to that and why beautifully so would hate to think such important insight would be lost due to context being seen as distasteful, with the large caveat noone should be cribbing one-liners like a juvenile from it given the critical thinking and self-reflection etc it is
supposed to provoke.
Agree I'm bored with individuals who think re-hash gravy train of 'we only want the best'; infer [patients/objectors] deluded; and then spend rest of article not very thinly veiled trying to build mind-game ramparts lest someone disagree with your 'big wisdom' of trust me because I've got myself a badge with a loveheart above [insert disease name]
Surely even half-interested social-media-types have moved past the days where just saying you support 'better non-specific x' was seen as a good thing lest you were inadvertently liking someone/thing underneath that mantra who was doing something different to what you assumed when the detail was unbundled. So you'd think there'd start to have to be
more in these articles these days.
